I will say, given the almost painful descriptive attempts at the island that Congressman Johnson was making, that regardless of whether he is currently on medication or not he should *not* be actively participating in any context of duty if that is an example of his reasoning and interrogative abilities.

Note also that in their press release they name Amazon as their "valuable customer for a long time" not us the readers and that's a main sticking point, for Macmillan readers *are not* the customers, while for Amazon they are and that's another essential reason to support Amazon btw.

In his speech last night, not only did Edwards * not* congratulate O (which was seriously unprofessional), but he kept banging on the fact that he has "backbone" -- a not very subtle hint that the "lover" O doesn't have the inner fire/willingness to fight.

Words with the same terminal sound

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Comments

I appreciate your point, Ptero, and I think there are a lot of cases where "to not X" may mean something different from "not to X". In the example of not eating dinner, the two meanings are entirely different ("avoiding dinner" v. "having improper table manners"), but usually a much more subtle is involved: (1) "I told you not to say that!" is different from (2) "I told you to not say that!", where we can imagine that the speaker's original instructions in (1) were simply "do not say this but rather this" and in (2) were more specifically disuasive: "I know you want to say this (or usually would say this, or are expected to say this), but in this case you must not say this." I think this is the same kind of difference as with "I told you not to come" and "I told you to not come" – essentially, this is a difference in the degree of forcefulness of the negative command.

The placement of the word "not" makes a difference, yet this difference is almost universally ignored. Consider these two hypothetical titles of books:

"How To Not Eat Dinner"

"How Not To Eat Dinner"

They don't mean the same thing. The first sounds like it's about fasting or dieting (avoiding dinner) -- the second sounds like it's about table etiquette (the manner in which you eat dinner).

I think they're both useful constructions, but I notice that there's a great taboo against the construction "to not". For example, we say "I told you not to come", even though we mean "I told you to not come".

Isn't this a shame? Such a useful distinction we could have available to us, and we throw it all away, just because we're afraid to split one lousy infinitive.

"I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate."-Harold Laski, quoted in "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell.

Interesting how the meaning clouds up a bit each time "not" appears...